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THE SHARE OF AMERICA IN 

CIVILIZATION 


BY 

JOAQUIM NABUCO 

/ > 



REPRINTED FROM THE 


American ftistomat §mm 


VOL. XV., No. I 


OCTOBER, igog 


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[Reprinted from The American Historical Review, Vol. XV., No. i, Oct., 1909.} 


THE SHARE OF AMERICA IN CIVILIZATION 1 


Gentlemen of the University of Wisconsin: 

Once going from Europe to Brazil, I heard at table an English 
writer, a great Eastern traveller, the late William Gifford Palgrave, 
ask the captain of the ship what good he thought had come from 
the discovery of America. For his part he could not see any, ex- 
cept for tobacco. That was the first time I heard that doubt ex- 
pressed ; but years afterwards I happened to buy an old French 
book, by an Abbe Genty, with this title : U In fluence de la Decouverte 
de r Amerique sur le Bonheur du Genre-Humain , and I saw that 
the curious question had been seriously proposed for a prize by the 
Academy of Lyons before the French Revolution. 

This is how it was formulated: “ Has the discovery of America 
been useful or prejudicial to mankind ?” The work is, on the 
whole, an empty declamation, in which there is nothing to reap, 
except the hope of the writer in the regeneration of mankind 
through the new-born American nation. He foresees in the inde- 
pendence of the Anglo-Americans, to quote his words, “ the event 
most proper to accelerate the revolution which will bring back 
happiness upon earth ”. “ It is in the bosom of this new-born 

Republic ”, he adds, “ that are deposited the true treasures which 
will enrich the world.” That makes the book worth preserving. 
But 1787, when the essay was written, was too early a date to treat 
the subject of the contribution of the New World to the welfare 
of mankind. 1787 was already the dawn of America’s day, but 
only the dawn. George Washington was President of the Constitu- 
tional Convention, but the influence of the great event, beyond its 
impact on the Old World, which had not yet produced the French 
Revolution, could not then be imagined. 

There is in the life of the nations a period in which the role 
assigned to them has not yet been revealed. The character of the 
Roman influence could not be foretold even during the great days 
of the Republic. A talk between Cicero and Caesar about the part 
of Gaul or of Britain in history would not take into consideration 
France or England; while one between Charlemagne and Alenin 

1 Baccalaureate address, Madison, June 20, 1909, by His Excellency the: 
Brazilian Ambassador. Ed. 

( 54 ) 


55 


Joaqiiim Nabuco 


about the part of Germany would be only a tale of the Middle 
Ages, now nearly forgotten. Even to-day who could say anything 
essential regarding the part of Japan or of China? Japan can be 
said to be in her dawn for the outside world, while China continues 
veiled in her long night, shining for herself alone. Who can even 
imagine what will be the record of either in the history of mankind? 
But it is no longer too early to study the share of America in civil- 
ization. We do not know her possibilities in the future, as we do 
not know those of electricity ; but we know already what electricity 

is, and so with your national individuality, we know already what 
it is. Nations reach at a certain time their full growth as individ- 
ualities; you seem to have reached yours. We are therefore better 
prepared to speak of it than was the French abbe, on the eve of the 
French Revolution. 

I had already chosen this fascinating subject when my atten- 
tion was called to the admirable address of President Eliot on it, 
years ago, pointing out five great American contributions to civiliza- 
tion. These were, in his words : first, and principal, the substitution 
of discussion and arbitration for war as the means of settling dis- 
putes between nations ; second, the widest religious toleration ; third, 
manhood suffrage; fourth, the demonstration of the fitness of a 
great variety of races for political freedom; fifth, the diffusion of 
material well-being among the population. 

I do not think all the points claimed as American contributions 
by President Eliot will bear in history the mark — made in America — 
but I think all of them have passed through such transformation 
and improvement here that they all deserve in part that mark. 

Still, we must be as careful not to write the history of civiliza- 
tion without taking into account the rest of mankind as we should 
be not to write it without America. The American race is not a 
race born of a sudden in an advanced state of civilization. It was 
in the time of the country’s formation the English race, only 
brought up in different surroundings; and now it is the product of 
the fusion, under its predominance, of that race with other races. 
Most probably the destiny of mankind would in the end be the 
same, if America had never appeared above the water; still, without 

it, much that has been already added to civilization would not yet 
exist, and perhaps never would, just as without a certain grouping 
of circumstances the artistic florescence of the Renaissance might 
never have bloomed. 

When we look for what belongs properly to America we must 
not comprise in her part what belongs to the English race, nor, I 


The Share of America, i)i Civilization 56 

will add, to other races forming the American nationality, although 
in the leading part played by this country one cannot yet well discern 
the influence of any race but the one from which it originally pro- 
ceeded. All that belongs to the natural evolution of the Anglo- 
Saxon civilization should not be ascribed to America only. A fruit 
is not special to a tree because it ripens earlier on it in some part 
of the world. Fruits really American are those which are only 

produced by American trees, whether in their own continent or 
transplanted abroad, although I would not hesitate to call American 
the fruits of those European trees which in their native soil are 
meagre and undeveloped and which acquire in the American soil a 
much stronger sap. 

Having this in view, I would not, for instance, count manhood 
suffrage as an American contribution to civilization. It cannot be 
said that England, or the world, depended at all on the United States 
for the conception and the development of manhood suffrage. Uni- 
versal suffrage is not even associated generally with America ; it 
is rather associated with France. Nor would I count arbitration. 
I do not think arbitration was born in this country. Proselytizing 
for peace is more the interest of nations threatened by war than of 
one protected against it. In the last years there has been a strong 
peace movement in America, but it has followed the European peace 
movement. Europe, being the continent threatened by war, needs 
a greater activity for peace. 

But President Eliot, in summing up his address, refers to that 
contribution in other words, as peace keeping. Expressed in that 
form, I have no doubt it has been one of your mightiest contribu- 
tions to civilization, because the peace pressure from America on 
Europe is the greatest pressure weighing on the world to keep down 
war. America, thanks to the Monroe Doctrine, is the Continent 
of Peace, and this colossal peace unit, interesting deeply other re- 
gions of the earth — the whole Pacific, one might say — forms a 
neutral hemisphere and balances the other hemisphere, which we 
might call the belligerent hemisphere. 

Still, we must remember that wars have generally come from 
obstacles to national aggrandizement, and that yours has never met 
with any serious obstacle. You are carrying out now, thanks to 
the confidence in your neutral character as well as to your prestige, 
a work that would be resisted, as one nation’s concern, by the other 
sea-powers, if undertaken by any other nation. With your pro- 
digious growth, your peace sentiment will have to be tested, when 
your national aggrandizement meets with the first serious obstacle. 


57 


Joaquim Nabuco 


The question is if you then would not proclaim the holy national war. 
As yet no one could say that peace is a permanent article of faith 
with you, such as are democracy and religious toleration, for in- 
stance. The great good fortune of mankind is that the period of 
your unopposed growth, permitting you to live in peace and to 
exercise your great moral and commercial pressure for peace, coin- 
cides with the time when the progress of civilization and probably 
that of science also will succeed in substituting international law 
for war, or in detaching war from international law, of which it 
still makes the principal part. 

Allow me to say that I believe that nothing would do more to 
fix on the mind of this great nation the purpose of peace than Pan- 
Americanism. Once Pan-Americanism were made her determined 
foreign policy, as it has already been, with the Monroe Doctrine, 
a reflex movement of hers, not only would she wed herself to peace, 
but she would also wed to it the rest of the continent, and that 
task would fill the time still necessary for mankind to disavow war. 
Peace and Pan-Americanism are convertible terms for you and for 
us. But, as what gives the greatest strength to your power for 
peace is immigration, I would classify immigration as the greatest 
of all contributions of America to civilization. 

Allow me a few remarks on this point. You are a nation in 
some respects of a unique type. The only one approaching that 
type was the Roman Empire, when near dissolution. Every other 
nation is, or was, composed of a race or of separate races, speaking 
each its own language ; you are a nation formed by the fusion of 
races of different languages, brought, by superior inducements, to 
speak only the hereditary language of the country. In other words, 
your are a nation formed of nations by their own will. Here lies 
all the difference : you are formed by free immigration, not by 
conquest. America is really the New-Europe; but, while the old 
Europe maintains its race barriers by a different patriotism, different 
national traditions, and different languages, here in New-Europe 
all those same European races mingle, intermarry, lose memory of 
their old allegiances, change the old European soul for the new 
American one, and, as this fusion takes place in millions of people, 
you are a nation whose ethnical formula varies at every generation. 
The racial components of your nationality change so rapidly their 
relative proportions that one could never say how they really stand 
to each other. Fortunately, your national consciousness has not 
to adjust itself to the census; it does not wait for the analysis of 
the race; it contents itself with the unalterable synthesis, which 
is: American . 


The Share of America in Civilization 58 

Strange to say, it is this ever-changing ethnical composition 
that keeps up your individuality, since this consists more than 
anything else of the spirit breathed on you at your creation, and the 
new accessions, wherever they hail from, assimilate eagerly and 
proudly that spirit as their chief birthright. With the constant 
influx of newcomers, the useless, inert or decayed, national residuum 
does not appear so much as it would if there were no new elements 
to make up for the waste. There is, indeed, in every society a 
sediment, formed of those parts in which the primitive national 
spirit has burnt itself out, at least partly, and which by themselves 
would not be fit to preserve and to continue the country’s indi- 
viduality. Any aristocracy in America would be a sediment of that 
kind. I do not mean that fine patina of time, which by figuration 
we call “ aristocracy ”. In this sense time everywhere is naturally 
aristocratic. 

There have been nations formed by conquest and composed also 
of different races, but among the latter particularism was always 
predominant, and they were kept indefinitely apart from each other. 
When the ancient world was reduced to Roman provinces, and after 
Caracalla had extended the right of citizenship to all the free 
inhabitants of the empire, the world saw a community in the style 
of yours, all its members claiming, through pride, the same nation- 
ality; but those were times of great dissension, and, besides, the 
fusion of the different races could not proceed so unimpeded as with 
you, owing to the many barriers of ancient local life. 

This is the first and greatest influence I would point out of the 
discovery of America on civilization: the appearance on earth of 
an immense continent destined to be the new home of the old Euro- 
pean races, where they would meet and mix and speak the same 
language, while in the native soil their old stocks would continue 
separated and up till now belligerent. In other words, a fact never 
seen or imagined before, of a mankind, a new mankind, formed 
by self-selection. 

The American nation was created by the sentiment of country; 
it was devotion to the native country, together with the feeling of 
freedom and independence, that led the colonists to break their ties 
with the old mother-country. But American democracy, which 
from the beginning gave to the pride of country a greater force, has 
grown to its present size by voluntary change of their national 
allegiance on the part of millions. Choosing one’s own country is 
a right that would not be generally acknowledged before this country 
created it and made it acceptable to the world. 


59 


Joaqinm fi \abuco 


Before the American spirit started immigration, the greatest 
human migration was the slave-trade, the covering of America by 
man-stealth with African slaves. The contrast between immigra- 
tion and the slave-trade is enough to show what a regenerating part 
the American spirit has had in the march of civilization. No page 
certainly is more brilliant in the whole history of England than her 
fight against the African slave-trade, when America was willingly 
filling herself with those of the kidnapped negroes who were not 
thrown overboard ; but, after all, what killed the slave-trade and 
slavery was immigration. Immigration, not slavery, represents the 
true American sap. Although Europe had nobly rid herself of 
slavery, thanks to Christianity, slavery was her colonial policy; in 
the New World slavery marked the period of European coloniza- 
tion and continued as a legacy from the colonial times after the 
Independence. Immigration, on the contrary, is characteristically 
American ; the attraction of free, wide, and growing America on the 
dense human layers of Europe. That attraction broke in Europe 
the old stratifications; created centrifugal forces. For the first 
time in history, immigration gave men and women of all nationalities 
a chance of transplantation, of trying life in more favorable circum- 
stances ; it destroyed what remained of a dungeon-like character in 
the old national barriers, by making country a wholly voluntary 
allegiance ; in a word, it upset forever the foundations of despotism, 
of practical serfdom, by rendering the people everywhere free to 
move away from it. I consider immigration the greatest force in 
modern civilization, and there is no doubt that it is an American 
force. 

After immigration I would name democracy. Democracy is 
also distinctly American. Although an English growth in America, 
it is different from the European growth, and has long reacted 
against the monarchical spirit of the English race. American his- 
tory is kingless, as European history is royal. The spirit of liberty, 
which was characteristically Anglo-Saxon, growing on a land with- 
out any monarchical tradition, took the form of democracy, or 
republic. Certainly there are elements fundamentally English in 
the American democracy, as there are others that are Greco-Latin. 
One cannot break the chain that binds through history the evolu- 
tion of an idea or of a sentiment, but the American democracy is 
genuinely new, a new design ; the ancients did not produce it, nor 
would Europe have produced it. So you can claim it for America 
as a contribution to civilization, not because the Republican govern- 
ment could be called a higher form of civilization than the mon- 


The Share of America in Civilization 60 

archical Parliamentary government, but because, by its competition 
and by the silent lesson of immigration, it has exercised the most 
beneficent influence on the liberal evolution of the monarchical gov- 
ernment in Europe. You can claim that you have transformed 
with your democracy not only the monarchical system of Europe, 
but her colonial methods of government as well. Democracy has a 
character of finality which monarchy has not, even expunged of all 
spirit of divine right, although the final form of democracy may yet 
be government by the best man, as was the Greek ideal. 

Some maintain, like Professor Mimsterberg in his criticism of 
President Eliot’s address, that your democracy came from Europe, 
from the philosophy of the eighteenth century. But the inspiration 
of that philosophy, as far as liberty is concerned, went largely from 
the New World. Nothing more strongly influenced Jean Jacques 
Rousseau than the impression of the New World. The French 
utopists of the eighteenth century did not take much from the dis- 
covery of India, China, and Japan; but the discovery of America 
was a creative impression for them, as during three centuries it 
was for their predecessors. No less a mind than Montaigne, for 
instance, will say of the American natives, writing in the sixteenth 
century : ‘‘I regret that Lycurgus and Plato did not know them, 
as it seems to me that what we see by experience among those 
nations not only surpasses all the pictures with which poetry has 
embellished the Golden Age, and all its inventions in imagining a 
happy condition of men, but also the conception and even the wish 
of Philosophy. . . . How distant from this perfection would Plato 
find his Republic ! ” 2 The whole Social Contract of Rousseau is 
implicit in this chapter of the Essays , two centuries older. It is a 
permanent and growing impression of centuries that which the free- 
born New World produced on the European mind, only to be re- 
placed by the other commanding, and also constantly growing, im- 
pression of the American democracy, after your independence. A 
book could be written on those two successive influences of the New 
World on the European imagination. 

Another very great contribution which I would like to mention 
is the equality of social conditions among all classes of the nation. 
That is what most struck Alexis de Tocqueville. “ When I 
survey ”, he wrote, “ this countless multitude of beings shaped in 
each other’s likeness, amidst whom nothing rises and nothing falls, 
the sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me.” But 
this fragment does not do justice to his feelings, as he ends by 


■ Liv. I., ch. xxxi 


Joaquim Nabuco 


6 i 

paying homage to the great principle of equality. The fact that 
Tocqueville ends his survey of America as he had begun it shows 
that the greatest impression produced on him was the general 
equality of conditions . That is the greatest impression it will pro- 
duce on anyone. This is the explanation why it has become the 
adoptive country, the elected home of men of all races, born and 
reared under the contrary principle of inequality. Just as Asia had 
her castes, Europe had her orders or classes. In America there is 
not between the different calls of life any difference of level, and 
this simple idea, this true social egg of Columbus, has made the 
success of this nation, transforming it from a people of one single 
stem, as it began, into a people of many stems, all giving the same 
fruit. But equality did not make only the success of this nation; 
it fixed the final type of human society everywhere. Like immigra- 
tion, like democracy, equality is final, and finality is in everything the 
greatest possible contribution to progress. 

For many people the idea of civilization will always correspond 
to the greatest development of art. But from the aesthetic point 
of view, there is no such thing as progress in the modern world, 
because if some arts have advanced, others, on the contrary, have 
retroceded. To put it in one single remark, the many countries 
round the Mediterranean, the Ionian, and the Higean seas must have 
all presented an incomparably more beautiful sight in the days of 
Hadrian, or of Constantine the Great, than in our days; in the same 
proportion, at least, as the Greece described by Pausanias to the 
Greece of Baedeker. You must not look for human progress in 
art. In art let us be retrogrades, of the times of Phidias, of 
Euainetos, of Vinci, of Beethoven. And as in art, so in poetry. 
Poetry will never more equal mythology. There is yet more poetry 
in the piece of land which the last earthquake of Messina has con- 
vulsed than in all the rest of the world, present or future. To 
renew the supply of poetry of the earth nothing less would be 
necessary than the communication with some other planet. That 
would indeed be a renewal of man’s imagination, infinitely greater 
than was the very great one, of the discovery of America. 

Yes, if I were asked of what good America was to Europe, I 
would say that Columbus cut large doors and windows on the west 
side of the old European manor-house, which received its ventilation 
only from the East. America has regenerated the Old World since 
the sixteenth century as effectually as the influx from Central Europe 
regenerated it in the Middle Ages. The pity was that the means 
of navigation were not greater in the time of the Roman Empire 


The Share of America in Civilization 


62 


and that the discovery was not made then, so as to have preserved 
the ancient civilization. 

But with regard to art, there is no doubt that there is a distinct 
American trait. While the English is solid and the French graceful, 
yours is clean-cut. There is an American perfection, as character- 
istic as the Japanese, which I believe is well defined by the word 
“ clean-cut 

Civilization should be essentially the improvement of the social 
condition of mankind, but we had better call civilization the increase 
of the intellectual power of man, as the increase of the intellectual 
power could alone lead^to a permanently satisfactory social condi- 
tion ; that is, to a condition based on truth and entrusted entirely to 
freedom. I do not believe that America is yet leading in the in- 
crease of the intellectual power of man, that is, of science; but I 
believe that it is already leading in the improvement of man’s social 
condition, I do not say alone, but with a few other nations, which 
look chiefly to you. 

The idea of civilization has been up till now associated with 
individual initiative ; in landed property, with the system of small 
estates, more than with the latif undid ; in trade and industry, more 
with competition than with concentration. But there is evidently 
now in progress an evolution, in the sense of unification, that can be 
called American. Great nationalities, cosmopolitan trains, fast 
boats, aeroplanes, cables, wireless telegraph, Hague Conferences, all 
seem to announce that the new tendency of mankind, in every 
direction, is the “ merger ”. In theory, centralization seems to 
assure the better service of so many millions of people, just as the 
cold storage assures their better feeding, by saving incalculable 
quantities of food which formerly would decay in the same day; 
but there are too many points to be considered in centralization, 
political and social, and only experience will shed any light over 
them. For the moment no one can say whether the new American 
political economy is or is not one of the great contributions of this 
country to civilization. The universities of America are watch- 
towers admirably prepared to follow the progress of the economical 
evolution and to solve in time the riddle of the Sphinx. One thing 
is sure: the age of Franklin will not end as the age of Midas. 

How can one refrain from mentioning among your greatest con- 
tributions to mankind your system of education? The American 
education seems the only one that is not wholly conventional, that is 
not a pure galvanization of states of mind of other ages, of the 
ideals of men who feed their mind and their heart on books, instead 
of feeding them on the sights and wants of their own times. You 


Jociquim A T abuco 


63 

alone give, as the greatest of all human teachings, self-reliance. 
And, a boon new to mankind, you teach self-reliance not only to 
men, but to women. There never existed in the world such a youth 
of both sexes with the same training for life. You plunge them, 
from childhood, in a bath that gives to both the strength and the 
elasticity of steel. You have changed the rhythm of life; you write 
it in quick tempo, and the world is catching from you the spirit of 
rapid transformation, and is writing it also in the American prestis- 
simo instead of the old adagio. 

Among your great contributions to civilization President Eliot 
rightly counts your great inventions ; still, as science is universal, 
inventions are generally suggestions from the work of other people, 
and those achieved by you would certainly have come out sooner or 
later with the progress of science. What has come from you, in 
opposition to the general modern tendency, is your respect for 
woman, the place you have made for her among mankind, together 
with the strong current of pure thought, which you oppose to the 
literature of sensualism flourishing among other races. Certainly 
asceticism, in the monastic times, and chivalry, in the Middle Ages, 
show well enough that Europe is capable of engendering the 
strongest currents of purity ; even yours is probably only a survival 
of English Puritanism, kept alive under more favorable conditions; 
but, with regard to purity of thought towards woman, the present 
leadership of the world belongs indeed to America. 

Gentlemen, I did not intend mentioning all the contributions of 
this country to civilization. Their complete cataloguing would be a 
most gigantic task ; it would certainly comprise your great con- 
tributions to international law. I only meant to give, you a few 
impressions on the usefulness of America beyond tobacco. 

Here is how an English observer, who, with Alexis de Tocque- 
ville, will remain one of the two classics of the ninetenth century 
on American democracy, the Right Plonorable James Bryce, por- 
trays the American people. I only put together the different 
features he has traced of you. According to him, you are a good- 
natured, a kindly, a humorous, a hopeful, an educated, a moral, 
and a well-conducted people ; your average of temperance, chastity, 
truthfulness, and general probity is somewhat higher than in any 
of the great nations of Europe; you are a religious people; every- 
thing among you tends to make the individual independent and self- 
reliant ; you are a busy people, and a commercial people; you are 
impressionable, capable of an ideality surpassing that of English- 
men or Frenchmen; you are an unsettled people, nobody feeling 
rooted to the soil, yet an associative and a sympathetic people ; you 


The Share of America in Civilization 


64 


are a changeful people, but not a fickle one, only growing warm 
suddenly and cooling as suddenly; you are a conservative people, 
prosperity serving to make you more so . 3 In a word, he says, 
summing up his whole work : “ America marks the highest level 
not only of material well-being, but of intelligence and happiness, 
which the race has yet attained.” I think such a portrait in the 
gallery of nations, even were some of its touches overflattering, 
which I do not think, is in itself a contribution to civilization. After 
it a remark seems necessary. 

Until now no European race has given in America exactly the 
same intellectual fruit as in its native soil, just as the French 
grapevines transplanted here will never give the same exquisite 
wines. There is no sign that the intellectual hegemony is passing 
from Europe to America. Europe has not begun to decay, and we 
must remember that the forming of new ideals, like Christianity, 
for instance, was many times the work of ages of decay, just as 
with certain fruits is the spread of seeds. America could not carry 
out the same work as Europe. There is an intellectual geography 
as there is a botanical or a zoological geography. The intellectual 
qualities of each leading race are different, and it would diminish 
the power of effort in this country, were it ever to feel assured that 
it had surpassed Europe. There is inspiration in the hope, but the 
victory itself would be the beginning of retrocession. Mankind 
must remain greater than any of its parts in all that makes the 
glory of civilization, and the children should not surpass the fathers 
in their lifetime. For many centuries Europe and America will 
lead together. 

Speaking of America, I have all the time taken the part for 
the whole and talked only of this country. It is rather early to 
speak of the part assigned in history to Latin America. We have 
not yet been ordered to enter the stage ; the plays of God are very 
long ones; his acts are ages. Up to now we have done, however, 
a considerable work of civilization against great difficulties, and I 
believe that nowhere could be selected finer types of man and 
woman than among our different nations. We hope we do honor 
to our native stocks and that we show, compared to them, traits of 
the same evolution as you present compared to the English race. 
Many ideals in the world are, in part at least, sustained by our 
faith, without its ever being noticed, owing to our retiredness, but 
more than once there has been a surprise in the world, when men 
from Latin America came to the front, as in the last Council of the 
Vatican or in the Second Hague Conference, or as when Santos- 

3 American Commonwealth, pt. IV., ch. lxxx. 


65 


Joaquim Nabuco 


Dumont, flying around Paris, opened the era of aerial navigation. 
Sometimes we appropriate the progress of civilization in a manner 
that they from whom it originated find too thorough for themselves. 
No constitution, for instance, except that of Brazil, provides that 
war shall only be authorized by the National Congress in case of 
arbitration being impossible 4 and no other contains such an article 
as its article 88 : “ The United States of Brazil, in no case, will enter 
into a war of conquest, either directly or indirectly, either alone or 
allied to another Power.”, Similarly the abolition of war for debt 
will be in international law a laurel surrounding the name of the 
Argentine Republic. But we feel great pride in recognizing the 
sons of Washington as the molders of our American civilization. 

Gentlemen, I thank President Van Hise for the very great honor 
of asking me to address your university, which stands in the front 
row of American universities. I take it as the best sign that the 
Continental feeling is already firmly rooted in this stronghold of 
American individuality. 

Joaquim Nabuco. 

4 Constitution of February 24, 1891, article 34, paragraph 11. 


AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XV. — 5. 


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